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I decided to pick up Syndicate in the PSN easter sale, resisting buying more of them in bundles...

I think in the Far Cry thread there was some mention of Ubisoft and "diversity". I noticed the message when I started up stating the development team included various political beliefs and gender identities. Is that really necessary?

One thing I find a bit daft about Syndicate is how enemies can magically pop out of trap doors in the roof of every building in London. I also find the fight system a bit annoying - I'd like to be able to dodge out of a group of enemies but I can't, so I'm locked into the hit/counter/break loop. Perhaps rightly this makes fighting your way through missions impossible, but it seems stupid that you can't roll your way out of a tight spot, unless I've completely missed something.

Otherwise I find the setting in Victorian London rather stunning and detailed. I also think the music fits perfectly.

Finally got around to playing Origins this weekend. Feels lot more like The Division with it's Diablo-esque leveling systems and loot grinding. Enemies that stomp you into the ground as soon as they're a few levels higher than you are, and tons of weapons to sort through and compare stats for. I'm not enjoying that aspect of it. I am enjoying the stealth/combat gameplay and exploring this world though, so I'll stick with it.

Finally got around to playing Origins this weekend. Feels lot more like The Division with it's Diablo-esque leveling systems and loot grinding. Enemies that stomp you into the ground as soon as they're a few levels higher than you are, and tons of weapons to sort through and compare stats for. I'm not enjoying that aspect of it. I am enjoying the stealth/combat gameplay and exploring this world though, so I'll stick with it.

Can you still stealth-kill all the enemies regardless of level differences?

Nope, stealth attacks do damage based on your level, your enemies' level and how much you’ve upgraded your hidden blade. Feels silly at first, but cleaning out a camp becomes more interesting than the overly easy assassinations in earlier games.

We are very pleased to share with you today some more information on the PC specs for Assassin's Creed Odyssey. As was already the case for Assassin's Creed Origins, the PC version is not a port of the console versions of the game, but a tailored experience developed by a dedicated team at Ubisoft Kiev in close collaboration with Ubisoft Québec, the lead studio on Odyssey. Having a dedicated team on the PC version allows us to offer the level of customization that PC players expect, which will enable them to adapt the experience to their PC configuration. The PC version of Assassin's Creed Odyssey will also include unique features not found in the console versions, such as benchmark tools to test the different graphics settings, and a toggle option for dynamic resolution rendering to uncap the framerate.

I'm not playing the game (yet - I think I'll wait a few months at least), but from what I've read around the internet it's pretty much bullshit. That sort of thing - easier XP for real-world money - has been in previous games in the series, and if you play the game, never go for any microtransactions and actually do side quests, you're more than adequately prepared for what the game throws at you. If you only speed through the main quest, well, you may have to grind a bit to be up to the challenges, but I don't see how this is any different from pretty much any number of open-world games with some sort of character progression, and if you don't play a game like Odyssey for the sprawl, I don't see why you'd be playing the game.

Playing the second of the two Origins DLCs has pretty much convinced me that I won't be getting Odyssey until it's come down in price. I'm sure I'll love the world the game creates, and many of the characters seem to be engaging, but for all the RPG trappings the game does seem to be doing exactly what Origins did, and there I more than got tired of the gameplay loop: go there, kill people, pick something up, come back.

Assassin's Creed's mechanisms have never been anything other than shallow - which is fine if you enjoy the other things the game has to offer, but that's where the promise of a BIGGER WORLD THAN EVER!!! actually puts me off. For me, a big open-world game has to provide a variety of gameplay to stay fresh, and that's not the kind of variety Origins offered. Ironically, the games in the series that were accused of getting stale did offer more varied gameplay, but none of the additions were very enjoyable, making the games feel both bloated and empty.

Everything I've heard about Odyssey makes it seem so bloated. I like having a lot of systems in games but I feel like having that many systems in a game is best suited for something like a Bethesda RPG where the story is optional and can be totally ignored, rather than a game that is supposed to be story driven. Side activities are great, but I dunno this AC just feels like it doesn't have enough confidence in the core mechanics so it has to throw in so much other stuff.

Bloated in terms of systems how, exactly? If anything there aren't enough from what I've played of ACOr, and ACOd seems to continue down that path. You've got a scouting eagle to give you NPC route x-ray vision, and the rest of the game's about running around and escorting people, finding people, biffing people, or various combinations thereof whilst equipping various blunt or pointy sticks. There's some collectable collecting if you want, but nothing near as irritating as running after capricious sea shanties, using predator vision to find secrets, or scouring megalopolises for a hundred goddamn feathers.

The reports say ACOd's bloated because of the gameworld size and volume of level-gated sidequests, which seems like a natural extension of where ACOr took the series - historically themed fetch quests with some decent incidental flavour, taking a page out of The Witcher 3's approach of treating sidequests as things that deserve a proper helping of context too. Of course, for a series as bland and shallow as AC, there's probably a point of diminishing returns even with that approach somewhere before the halfway mark.

I'm currently playing through AC - Unity. At first I found the game to be boring as hell, but it improves after a while. Man is this game hard though. You will die A LOT. And not through the computer cheating, it's since a fair few of the missions have an absolute sea of enemies surrounding the targets. So you will get zerged a fair bit, with no chance of survival.

I miss the territory control stuff + have other friendlies to help me in missions that AC - Syndicate brought with it. Now Syndicate wasn't perfect either, and this game definitely has a better combat system, but since you get zerged + shot at QUITE A BIT in this game, the combat in Syndicate is far easier. In Syndicate I happily jumped into a fight as I knew I'd likely win. In this one, not so much. The enemies propensity to shoot, where in the other games they'd run in for melee combat just makes it all that much harder. Still enjoying it though, as it forces you into playing more stealthy. More actual Assassin-like.

It's just when you have missions that require open conflict that you get into trouble.

One thing that does attract me to Odyssey (it came up in the Easy Allies video review) is Exploration Mode, which deactivates markers such as quest objectives, so you actually have to look for stuff. This in itself isn't remarkable - but apparently the game has been designed so that it actually works in Exploration Mode, i.e. you get environmental hints (e.g. footprints, bloody tracks) and conversations actually point you in the right direction. That kind of thing was common in the Old Days, obviously, but few games in the last 10 years or so have done this, or at least done this well.

To be fair, TW3 did try something like that here and there, but wasn't entirely successful. It's definitely a nice touch, the last game I recall that did it successfully was Outcast, with the ability to ask any of its NPCs for directions, and their answers giving you general directions towards your destination - just a little thing like that (though not entirely trivial from a programming point of view, possibly) adds immensely to the sense of immersion.

Morrowind did it as well, if I remember correctly. I think it would've been around the time of Oblivion that quest markers became the default in open-world games.

My impression is, though, that devs are slowly moving towards making those comfort options truly optional. You can definitely play Arkane's recent games without objective markers as much as you could Thief and System Shock, and apparently Shadow of the Tomb Raider still works well if you switch off the obvious textures telling you where you set Exploration difficulty to High (not sure what all the elements are that get changed or removed in that one, though).

Honestly, all I recall of Morrowind in that regard is wrangling with its increasingly useless quest journal, and sifting through NPC infodumps for pertinent details whilst being desperately bored by all of them.

Dishonored 2 definitely needs more work in visual navigation without the objectives markers - henke noted an instance where there was a bloodfly-infested corpse that was an objective and the game doesn't say you need that one specifically, and I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't read his post. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is linear despite its semi-open structure, so it's generally not hard to find where you need to go. Exploration on Hard means you don't get survival instinct highlighting, so no objective markers, supply cache/artifact highlighting, and so on. It's definitely the better way to play because it makes you more invested in studying the environment and finding things yourself, instead of behaving like a treasure-sucking hoover stuck on autopilot and rumbling around wherever the game tells you to go.

I must've lucked out on that particular corpse, since I don't remember having to look around for the right one. Nonetheless, after a decade or so of games being designed to use quest markers so that they're not really optional, I'm okay with games getting it right most of the time but screwing things up once or twice.

For me it's really the thing you mention: if you actually have to study the environment, you're more invested. Otherwise it's way too easy to develop tunnel vision where all you see is UI elements: the minimap and the quest markers. Which is a massive shame, because with games such as Assassin's Creed, the environment is probably the one thing they get most right - but if you're running around focused on the X that marks the spot, you don't really take it in. I appreciated Syndicate's city much more than Unity's because I forced myself to slow down and look around - to basically switch to walking simulator mode whenever I came to a new area that I hadn't seen before. That's when my enjoyment peaked, because I started to take in the subtleties in the environmental design.

I remember reading that the first Ass Creed was designed to be played without a HUD and not only is it perfectly playable without it, but turning it off supposedly makes the game better. Haven't tried that myself.

My friends bought me Odyssey as present, because I used to constantly tire them by talking about the Peloponessian War by Thucydides (I really like that book). My first impression is that it's very nice. The core gameplay is similar to Origins, yet to me it feels very different (it was made by different people after all).